Dennis Hollingsworth

"...when utility comes calling.''

WooooOOOOOooooooo.

In Nobel's view, contemporary architecture is particularly ill suited to meeting expectations like these. Touring quickly through modernism's descent into inscrutability and antiurbanism and postmodernism's playful rejection of meaning and truth in design, he argues that contemporary architects' irresponsible obsession with style over substance made them incapable of connecting with the site; instead they saw in it an opportunity for high-theory speculation. ''A culture of surfaces had left its artists poorly equipped for depth,'' he writes, even as depth was the very thing demanded of them. Which is not to say they didn't try. Nobel mercilessly needles the participants in the January 2002 show at the Max Protetch Gallery, who presented a cornucopia of avant-garde architectural wit but also a ''fatal distance from public need,'' unbuildable designs that responded to problems ''too conjectural, too personal, too obscure, too sensational . . . to be of much use when utility comes calling.''